From History of Evolution

Contents 1 Late 19th and Early 20th Century Developments 1.1 Higher Biblical Criticism 1.2 Pushing Back: The Fundamentals 1.3 Eclipse of Natural Selection 1.4 Cross-talk Between the Two Streams 1.5 George McCready Price and Flood Geology

Late 19th and Early 20th Century Developments

Several streams of thought in science and religion are relevant to our concern on this wiki in the late 19th and early 20 centuries. In religion, the most relevant stream is the growing influence of the higher Biblical criticism which had its roots in late 18th century Germany and the consequent push-back from conservative theology, and in biology it was the so-called "eclipse of natural selection" and the exploration of alternative models of biological change. The two streams were not isolated from each other. For example, conservative theologians adopted some of the arguments of anti-natural selection science to criticize their more theologically liberal co-religionists.

Higher Biblical Criticism

Higher Biblical Criticism came out of Germany in the late 18th and early 19th century. It is contrasted with 'lower' criticism, more commonly called textual criticism. Biblical textual criticism is directed at ascertaining the true version of the Bible, attempting to recover the "original autographs." Thus textual critics analyze the multitude of fragmentary ancient manuscripts in an effort to reconstruct what the original Bible authors actually wrote, on the assumption that the original autographs are the most reliable basis for belief.

Higher Biblical criticism treats the Bible as a document to be analyzed and understood in the light of its internal structure and its literary, historical, and socio-cultural contexts. While originally focused mainly on literary analysis of a work in itself, it rapidly came to treat a document as a human work situated in a time and place, and inquired into the effects of that time and place on what it says. For Biblical studies, it means in part to analyze the Bible in terms of the ancient Near Eastern context in which it had its origin.

Theological -- or at least religious -- problems arise when higher Biblical criticism contradicts traditional beliefs held in the larger religious communities. For example, it is a traditional belief that Moses (with the inspiration of God) wrote the Pentateuch -- the first five books of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. However, analyses of literary style and vocabulary (among other internal variables) suggest that there were multiple authors of even just Genesis, with parts attributed to authors called "J", "P", and "R". This is the Documentary hypothesis. Several themes are discerned in Genesis -- a pastoral/nomadic theme and an agricultural/urban theme -- that are reflected (among other places) in the two quite different creation accounts in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. Analysts like theologian Conrad Hyers relate the two forms of Biblical accounts to the two main ways of life in ancient Israel, which were pastoral and nomadic living on the one hand, and settled agriculture and urban living on the other. The two accounts, it is argued, stem from two different socio-cultural contexts. They may carry the same theological message, but they reflect two different vehicles, two different ways of telling the theological story.

An immediate hermeneutic (interpretive) implication of that approach to Biblical analysis is that in order to understand the theological message of the Bible, the vehicle(s) via which the story was originally told -- the particular metaphors and analogies that were used at the time of its writing -- must be separated from the theological message. Thus it is argued that the Bible is not telling a literal story (or really, stories) of creation, but rather is using then-contemporary terms and concepts to tell a timeless theological story to an ancient Near Eastern audience using terms and concepts that pre-scientific audiences would understand given their particular cultural context.

That's the opening by which 19th century Day-Age and Gap theorists accommodated the geological record of an old earth. Secular geology was finding that the earth is much older than the genealogies of the Old Testament would seem to imply. In order to accommodate that finding, Day-Age and Gap interpretations of the Bible put time into it, either by positing that each "day" of the 6-day creation in Genesis 1 was an indefinitely long period, or that there was an indefinitely long gap between two different creation events in Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2. They attempted to preserve the theological message -- God created the world and all that is in it -- while re-interpreting the ancient Near Eastern vehicle to accommodate an audience informed by science.

Pushing Back: The Fundamentals

As higher Biblical criticism became more widespread in the English-speaking world, conservative theologians began to push back, criticizing the criticism. The first half dozen essays in The Fundamentals are devoted to resistance to higher Biblical criticism. For example, with reference to the analysis of the authorship of Genesis described above, Robert Anderson wrote in Essay 6, Christ and Criticism, that

[Higher criticism] directly challenges the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ as a teacher; for one of the few undisputed facts in this controversy is that our Lord accredited the books of Moses as having divine authority.

Similarly, George Frederick Wright, who 20 years earlier was theologically and scientifically similar to his friend Asa Gray, Darwin's greatest supporter in the U.S., wrote

1. THE BURDEN OF PROOF

The Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch has until very recent times been accepted without question by both Jews and Christians. Such acceptance, coming down to us in unbroken line from the earliest times of which we have any information, gives it the support of what is called general consent, which, while perhaps not absolutely conclusive, compels those who would discredit it to produce incontrovertible opposing evidence. But the evidence which the critics produce in this case is wholly circumstantial, consisting of inferences derived from a literary analysis of the documents and from the application of a discredited evolutionary theory concerning the development of human institutions.

Wright concluded,

Those who now at second hand are popularizing in periodicals, Sunday School lessons, and volumes of greater or less pretensions the errors of these critics must answer to their consciences as best they can, but they should be made to feel that they assume a heavy responsibility in putting themselves forward as leaders of the blind when they themselves are not able to see.

The push back got more than a little testy. For example, writing in Chapter 1 of the Fundamentals, Canon Dyson Hague wrote

It is notorious that some of the most learned German thinkers are men who lack in a singular degree the faculty of common sense and knowledge of human nature.

As noted above, higher criticism had its origin in Germany.

While the various authors of The Fundamentals allowed greater or lesser leeway in interpreting Biblical passages according to the higher critics' approach, they seem nearly unanimous in rejecting the core implication that the theological message is independent of the vehicle conveying it. Nevertheless, at least one author, James Orr, made a clear distinction between the message and the vehicle:

The Bible clearly does not profess to anticipate the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its design is very different; namely, to reveal God’ and His will and His purposes of grace to men, and, as involved in this, His general relation to the creative world, its dependence in all its parts on Him, and His orderly government of it in Providence for His wise and good ends. Natural things are taken as they are given, and spoken of in simple, popular language, as we ourselves every day speak of them. The world it describes is the world men know and live in, and it is described as it appears, not as, in its recondite researches, science reveals its inner constitution to us.

Eclipse of Natural Selection

In the late 19th and early 20th century, while common descent was widely accepted, Darwin's hypothesis that natural selection was a strong driver of biological diversification fell into disfavor. Three main factors contributed to that decline.

First was the purported inability of small gradual changes to generate the large discontinuities one sees in between living organisms and fossils. Cuvier's observation that he saw no transitional forms in the fossil record still held, and Darwin had explicitly claimed that many such transitional forms should have existed in the past.

Second, the perceived difficulty of evolving the various parts of complex structures was thought to be a problem for natural selection. Herbert Spencer, a hugely important writer in the last half of the 19th century, also argued the inadequacy of natural selection. By 1882 Spencer was arguing that the coordinated changes in many parts of a body required to produce, say, the enormous antlers of the (now extinct) Irish elk could not be accounted for by natural selection:

As far back as 1864 (Principles of Biology, § 166) I named in illustration an animal carrying heavy horns—the extinct Irish elk; and indicated the many changes in bones, muscles, blood-vessels, nerves, composing the fore-part of the body, which would be required to make an increment of size in such horns advantageous. (p. 178)

And quoting himself from his 1864 Principles of Biology Spencer concluded:

But in proportion as the life grows complex—in proportion as a healthy existence cannot be secured by a large endowment of some one power, but demands many powers; in the same proportion do there arise obstacles to the increase of any particular power, by “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.

Third, there was no good theory of inheritance. How morphological changes -- which, after all, is what selection must operate on -- were transmitted from parent generation to offspring was unknown. There were proposals, as for example Darwin's speculations about gemmules produced by body parts of parents being somehow combined and transmitted to offspring, but they saw inheritance as an analog phenomenon, implying blending inheritance. Fleeming Jenkin had vividly pointed out in 1860 how with blending inheritance even large changes would be swamped in an interbreeding population. Therefore adaptation via natural selection couldn't get off the ground.

Fourth, throughout the Enlightenment the notion of progress was ubiquitous. Herbert Spencer in particular co-opted Darwinian evolution to account for change in a broad range of phenomena, including everything from geology to politics and literature. In 1852 Spencer wrote:

Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmical changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, is that in which progress essentially consists.

Cross-talk Between the Two Streams

The various scientific criticisms of evolution were taken up by conservative theologians to chastise their more liberal brethren for too hastily accommodating the findings of geology and biological evolution. One sees that in many of the essays comprising The Fundamentals. For example, in the essay titled The Fallacies of the Higher Criticism one finds:

A second fundamental fallacy of the higher criticism is its dependence on the theory of evolution as the explanation of the history of literature and of religion.

...

The Spencerian philosophy of evolution, aided and reinforced by Darwinism, has added greatly to the confidence of the higher critics.

The essay concludes that

But the hypothesis of evolution, when applied to the history of literature, is a fallacy, leaving us utterly unable to account for Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, the greatest poets of the world, yet all of them writing in the dawn of the great literatures of the world. It is a fallacy when applied to the history of religion, leaving us utterly unable to account for Abraham and Moses and Christ, and requiring us to deny that they could have been such men as the Bible declares them to have been. The hypothesis is a fallacy when applied to- the history of the human race in general.

Henry Beech's Decadence of Darwinism asserted

The teaching of Darwinism, as an approved science, to the children and youth of the schools of the world is the most deplorable feature of the whole wretched propaganda.

George Frederick Wright, already quoted above, seized on Kelvin's estimates of the age of the earth to criticize Darwinian evolution:

As to Geological Time. The establishment of Darwin’s theory as he originally proposed it involved the existence of the earth in substantially its present condition for an indefinite, not to say infinite, period of time.

...

... Lord Kelvin would reduce the period to less than 30 million years, which Alfred Russel Wallace affirms is sufficient time for the deposition of all the geological strata.

and

Modern evolutionary speculations have not made much real progress over those of the ancients. As already remarked, they are, in their bolder forms atheistic; while in their milder forms they are "deistic" — admitting, indeed, the agency of God at the beginning, but nowhere else. The attempt, however, to give the doctrine standing through Darwin’s theory of the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection has not been successful; for at best, that theory can enlarge but little our comprehension of the adequacy of resident forces to produce and conserve variations of species, and cannot in the least degree banish the idea of design from the process.

So The Fundamentals marshaled both theological and scientific arguments in the battle against the higher critics.

George McCready Price and Flood Geology

George McCready Price spent his life attempting to both undermine standard geology and produce a 'scientific' version of Flood geology to replace the standard view. He was the progenitor of "scientific" creationism, and carried that load mostly alone for nearly five decades of the first half of 20th century. This account follows Ronald Numbers' The Creationists.

Price was converted to 7th Day Adventism at 15 when his mother joined that church. The 7-Day Adventist Church grew out of a splinter of the Millerites in the mid-19th century. A striking figure in the early Adventist church was Ellen G. White, a prophetess and visionary. For our purposes the relevant aspects of White's theology was her insistence on a literal 6-day creation and firm opposition to theological attempts to insert more time into the creation week, for example the Day-Age interpretation of Genesis. With respect to Day-Age creationism, White wrote:

But the infidel supposition, that the events of the first week required seven vast, indefinite periods for their accomplishment, strikes directly at the foundation of the Sabbath of the fourth commandment. It makes indefinite and obscure that which God has made very plain. It is the worst kind of infidelity; for with many who profess to believe in the record of creation, it is infidelity in disguise.

And she said that in a vision she was transported back to creation week and saw that it was just a week:

…carried back to the creation and was shown that the first week, in which God performed the work of creation in six days and rested on the seventh day, was just like every other week. (quoted in Numbers, p. 90)

Price wholly agreed, and seeing geology, with its positing of deep time, as the Achilles heel of evolution determined to replace it with a catastrophist interpretation of the geological record.

In a series of books, initially self-published, Price argued that a number of geological features could not be explained by "uniformitarian" geology, and required a massive catastrophe for their explanation. He was particularly fond of unconformities -- geological features that seemed to contradict the standard geological theories. For example, Price cited the Lewis Overthrust in Glacier National Park, an overthrust where Cambrian strata roughly 1.3 Ga overlays Cretaceous strata roughly 100 Ma, as a geological feature that could not be accounted for by "orthodox" geologists.

Price focused on so-called index fossils, particular fossils characteristic of specific strata used to locate the strata in the geological column. That practice goes back to James Hutton in 18th century Great Britain, who noticed the regularities in the distribution of fossils across strata in his surveying work for canal building. Price originated a trope that is still used by young earth creationists, the claim that geologists circularly date fossils by the strata they're found in and date the strata by the fossils found in them. For example, in 2007Answers in Genesis (accessed 11 Nov 2008), a contemporary young earth ministry, claims

In other words, they ["evolutionists"] use the fossils to date the rocks. There is a predetermined age for certain fossils (once again based on assumption), and when they are found in a certain rock layer, that rock layer is given that age. Interestingly enough, the fossils are dated by the rock layers they are in, an example of circular reasoning.

Price was not published in the scientific literature -- indeed, he had little scientific training, amounting to one year of college natural science. However, he said that he had consciously decided to bypass the scientific journals, writing in 1924

Over 20 years ago, when first making some of my geological researches, I came face to face with the question: How shall I publish my discoveries? If I wait for the dilatory methods of "orthodox" scientific pedantry, through the media of papers before scientific societies, etc., I will be greyheaded before I can force recognition of these discoveries. On the other hand, if I publish in some "unorthodox" (scientifically) way, such as through the popular or religious journals, I will very likely be boycotted by the standpat scientists, and almost turned out of the scientific synagogue.

I chose the latter method; and the result has been as might have been expected. But I have never regretted my choice; for I believe a much greater number of people have been benefitted by my publications. (quoted in Numbers, p. 110)

One is put in mind of contemporary intelligent design creationist William A. Dembski, who was quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education as saying

I've just gotten kind of blase about submitting things to journals where you often wait two years to get things into print," he says. "And I find I can actually get the turnaround faster by writing a book and getting the ideas expressed there. My books sell well. I get a royalty. And the material gets read more.

Price advised William Jennings Bryan as he prepared for the Scopes trial in 1925, suggesting that Bryan not introduce "scientific" evidence in the prosecution of Scopes for teaching evolution contrary to the Butler Act. Bryan was a day-age creationist and so testified during the trial, and Price was reportedly incensed by Bryan's testimony.

Price also participated in attempts to found creationist science organizations in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, a non-Adventist admirer of his geology, Dudley Joseph Whitney, founded the Religion and Science Association. As Numbers notes, the RSA was short-lived, but it marked the beginning of the development of what amounts to a "scientific" movement inside fundamentalism. The RSA made an effort to include people from non-Adventist denominations, notably Lutherans from conservative synods, Norwegian, Wisconsin, and Missouri. The Missouri Synod actually held to a Ptolemaic (geocentric) view of the solar system on Biblical grounds until well into the 20th century.

Price's influence persists today in the form of the Institute for Creation Research. The ICR's founder, the late Henry Morris, in his 1961 book with theologian John C. Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood: The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, the founding document of the modern young earth creationist movement, specifically cited Price's influence.